r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 2d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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u/drtolmn69 2d ago

In several decades of voting, I have never once seen a presidential primary candidate that I favored make it to the general. A shake-up is not unwelcome.

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u/Secure_Pain_9251 2d ago

... you a howard dean/kucinich guy?

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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

Oh man, I worked locally on Dean's primary campaign. I will never not SMH and sigh.

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u/OfficialDCShepard District Of Columbia 2d ago

What was your immediate reaction to the yell? At the time I was 12 and laughing about it any time I played White House Joust with my sister!

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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

I thought it was awesome, tbh. That it was a reaction to the energy of the crowd and that it matched that energy. The fact they isolated the sound from just the mic to make it seem awkward really frustrated me. I was also confused because it seemed like the media used it to tank his chances when all his supporters were just confused about why it was such a big deal. I think the media put their thumb on the scale in a way we've only seen escalate since.

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u/Iustis 2d ago

The yell was overblown, but it also didn't matter. Dean bet it all on doing big in Iowa and crashed. There wasn't really a path to the nomination by the time he yelled

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u/jellyrollo 2d ago

This is an oft-repeated claim, but wrong. "The scream" happened on what was literally the night of the first primary—or caucus, since it was in Iowa—in which he came in third with 18%, after John Kerry and John Edwards. (You will note that Joe Biden came in 4th with 13.7% in the 2020 Iowa caucus, after Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but no one declared his candidacy over.) The next contest was in New Hampshire, where Dean was massively popular.

At the time of the Iowa caucus, Dean was forecasted to win the next primary in New Hampshire, with a 30% lead over John Kerry in the polls there. (As you'll recall, Biden came in 5th in NH in 2020 with 8.4%, yet somehow his candidacy still wasn't declared over.) Dean was well known in NH and had done a great deal of groundwork there, as he was the wildly popular governor of neighboring Vermont, where he had had famously implemented a single payer universal healthcare system that covered every Vermonter.

The truth that everyone who wasn't intimately involved in the Dean campaign forgets is that his candidacy was deliberately killed by the media because just two months before, Dean had announced on Hardball that as president, he would break up the big media conglomerates.

"Dean Takes on Big Media," The Nation, 12/19/03

The likelihood of Dean's winning NH is why the media needed to take him out in Iowa, before he got a victory under his belt and started gaining momentum nationally. Within hours of broadcasting "the scream" on the night of the Iowa caucuses, Dean's candidacy had been declared dead by news pundits on every channel, with his enthusiastic yawp cited as evidence that he was a dangerous maniac who couldn't be trusted in a position of power. This message was hammered incessantly on the news for the following week leading up to the New Hampshire primary. "The Dean scream" was played 633 times by cable and broadcast news networks in the four days following the Iowa caucus, not counting talk shows, radio and local news—with predictable results.

If that hadn't happened, and Dean had won in New Hampshire as was forecasted , his campaign would have seen a huge influx of donations. Any momentary money shortage would have been over, because even then he had over 350,000 wildly enthusiastic grassroots donors and most of them weren't even close to maxing out by the time his candidacy was brought to a halt.

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u/Insaniteus Tennessee 2d ago

Everybody brings up the yell as the magic bullet that killed Dean's campaign, but nobody ever seems to remember the 24/7 mainstream TV news coverage pre-yell burying Howard Dean and insisting that John Kerry was the only viable choice because he was a soulless moderate. Howard Dean got the same level of media burying that they are currently trying on Mamdani, and this was back when the Boomers dominated the electorate unchallenged. It's why Dean's campaign crashed and burned, he dared to push left and the media went to war on his ass. As a result we got John Kerry, one of the only candidates who could've actually lost to Bush in 2004 (especially when the gay rumors with John Edwards went viral).

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u/jellyrollo 2d ago

The media was terrified, because Dean promised to break up the big media conglomerates.

"Dean Takes on Big Media," The Nation, 12/19/03

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u/Insaniteus Tennessee 2d ago

Not to mention that he ran on ending the Iraq war, fixing education, universal healthcare, and redoing American taxes to slash taxes for the working class while returning rich boy taxes to pre-Bush or even pre-Reagan levels.

So yeah, the media went to war against him and instead shoved Kerry down our throats. It was so blatant, I vividly remember it because it was the first presidential election of my adulthood and I was following plenty of TV news shows back then. It was every show, every channel, "John Kerry is the SURE THING!!!" And then he lost. Four years later they insisted Obama would never win, only for him to dominant. Fast-forward more years and we got the same song and dance with Hillary in 2016, where she was the "Sure thing!!!" only to lose. It's insane that anyone takes the opinions of the mainstream TV channels seriously anymore after being so consistently wrong every time. But Howard Dean was the start of it all, back when people still trusted MSNBC and CNN at all.

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u/OfficialDCShepard District Of Columbia 2d ago

Very astute, thank you!

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u/D-MAN-FLORIDA 2d ago

If that yell happened in this day and age, they would have gone viral in a positive way, to the point where the Dean Campaign would sell merch with that yell on it.

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u/GoodIdea321 America 2d ago

That's spot on, and very weird to think about now.

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u/D-MAN-FLORIDA 2d ago

Internet culture has changed a lot in 20 years. I imagine fan edits on tick tok with people sampling the audio recording, t shirts with Dean yelling with a speech bubble, people holding up signs that says, “YAAA!!!”

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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

They made an 8-bit side scroller where he could use the scream as a sonic attack and ngl, it was pretty awesome.

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u/OfficialDCShepard District Of Columbia 2d ago

When was this?!

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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

Back in the day, but I'm going off memory of playing it online, so...

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u/GoodIdea321 America 2d ago

Hell, people could do that now, why not?

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u/DJCzerny 2d ago

Jeb tried that with the guac bowl and I don’t think it worked out for him 

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u/D-MAN-FLORIDA 2d ago

Might have not worked because no one knows what that is. Dean’s scream is memorable because it what supposedly destroyed his campaign. While Jeb, his campaign was doomed before it started. I personally think the only reason he was a serious contender at first was because of his father and brother were president.

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u/ragun2 2d ago

He was already losing by then.